He put his fist to his mouth, ashamed of the way his throat closed up and his words jammed painfully in the bottleneck. When the moment had passed, he relaxed and sat back in his seat. He’d said enough. There was no satisfaction in this. He couldn’t even hurt her without hurting himself.
‘I was a stupid girl,’ said Trinica quietly. ‘Stupid enough to believe the world began and ended with you. I thought I could never be happy again.’
Frey had sat forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees and his fingers tangled in his fringe. His voice was brittle. ‘I ran out on you, Trinica. But I never gave up on myself. And I never tried to take our child with me.’
‘Oh, you gave up on yourself, Darian,’ she replied. ‘You were just a little more indirect. You spent three years drinking yourself to death and putting yourself in harm’s way. In the end, you took your whole crew with you.’
Frey couldn’t muster the energy to argue. The weary, conversational tone in which she delivered her accusation robbed him of the will to defend himself. Besides, she was right. Of course she was right.
‘We’re both cowards,’ he murmured. ‘We deserved each other.’
‘Maybe,’ said Trinica. ‘Maybe neither of us deserved what we got.’
All the fire had gone out of Frey. A black, sucking tar-pit of misery threatened to engulf him. He’d imagined this confrontation a thousand ways, but they all ended with him demolishing Trinica, forcing her to face the horror of what she’d done to him. Now he realised there was nothing he could say to her that she hadn’t already thought of, nothing he could punish her with that she hadn’t already used to punish herself more effectively than he ever could.
The truth was, his position was so fragile that it fell apart when exposed to the reality of an opposing view. While he nurtured his grievances privately, he could be appalled at how she’d mistreated him. But it didn’t hold up to argument. He couldn’t pretend to be the only one wronged. They’d ruined each other.
Damn it, he hadn’t wanted to talk. And now here they were, talking. She always had a way of doing that to him.
‘How’d you get this way, Trinica?’ he said. He raised his head and gestured at her across the gloomy study. ‘The hair, the skin . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You used to be beautiful.’
‘I’m done with beautiful,’ she replied. There was a long pause, during which neither of them spoke. Then Trinica stirred in her seat and faced him.
‘You weren’t the only one who turned away from me after I tried to kill myself,’ she said. ‘My parents were disgraced. Bad enough they had a daughter who was going to give birth outside of marriage; now she’d killed their grandchild. They could barely look at me. My father wanted to send me to a sanatorium.
‘In the end, I stole some money and took an aircraft. I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to get away. I suppose I thought I could be a pilot.
‘I was caught by a pirate two weeks later. They must have seen me in port and followed my craft out. They forced me down and boarded me, then took my craft to add to their little fleet. I thought they’d kill me, but they didn’t. They just kept me.’
Frey couldn’t help a twinge of pain. That dainty, elegant young woman he’d left behind hadn’t been equipped to survive in the brutal, ugly world of smugglers and freebooters. She’d been sheltered all her life. He knew what happened to people like that.
‘I wasn’t much more than an animal to them,’ she went on. Her tone was dead, without inflection. ‘A pet to use as they pleased. That’s what beautiful does for you.
‘It took me almost two years to work up the courage to put a dagger in the captain’s neck. After that, I stopped being a victim. I signed on as a pilot for another crew, learned navigation on the
